Quote

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Time
Views
Life
Takes
Backward
Lines
Manhood
Moment
Crosses
Moments
Line
Firsts
View
First
Perhaps
Every
Boys

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
Sherwood Anderson
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Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
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There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.
Sherwood Anderson
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If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
Sherwood Anderson
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Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
Sherwood Anderson
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The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
Sherwood Anderson
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The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
Sherwood Anderson
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The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
Sherwood Anderson
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Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?
Sherwood Anderson
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You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.
Sherwood Anderson
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The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Sherwood Anderson
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I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.
Sherwood Anderson
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As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.
Sherwood Anderson
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It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
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The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson
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The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.
Sherwood Anderson
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Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
Sherwood Anderson
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I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson